Sledgehammer_ made its New York debut in 1994 at the Whitney Museum of American Art with a one-time performance of Erik Ehn’s “No Time Like the Present.”

“To be always what I am  and so changed from what I was,” muses the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s surreal theatrical classic “Happy Days.”

That sentiment might also apply to Sledgehammer_, the pioneering San Diego experimental-theater outfit that’s now returning — changed and yet, in sensibility, somewhat the same — after years of dormancy.

The company’s defiantly unsubtle name (now with that funky little underscore appended to the end) says a lot about its aims, then and now. So does the fact that in “Happy Days,” which Sledgehammer_ is about to stage as its first production since 2008, Winnie utters those words while half-buried in soil.

In its heyday (the company produced regularly for about 20 years, starting in the mid-1980s), Sledge was a champion of the alternative, the in-your-face and the often deeply weird.

But eventually, money grew tight; people moved on; respectability (shudder) seeped into the lives of the three co-founders, all UC San Diego grads.

Ethan Feerst moved to L.A. and became a web whiz. Robert Brill rode his local notice all the way to Broadway, where he’s still a go-to set designer. Scott Feldsher taught college and then returned to San Diego; he’s now in his 10th year at La Jolla Country Day, where he’s the upper-school drama instructor.

But the seeds of a Sledge comeback were planted in Feldsher’s conversations with Dana Hooley and Francis Thumm, married actors who were once active with the company. They talked in particular about “Happy Days” and Beckett, whose work Feldsher adores.

Finally, Hooley proclaimed that “we have to do it,” Feldsher recalls. “And I said, ‘If you and Francis will do it, I’ll direct it.”

Soon, “Ethan got back involved and got excited. And Robert Brill happened to be back in town, and he got excited. And all of a sudden it started getting this synergy.”

Feldsher said the two-actor show, going up at the 10th Avenue Theatre and Arts Centre downtown, will reflect “what we originally started out to be — a project-oriented company where we develop work. (And) fully producing things when they’re ready and we have money,” instead of winding up on an institutional “treadmill” programming seasons and doing endless fundraising to support them.

Feldsher also talks of resurrecting such ideas as turning Sledgehammer_ into a kind of curatorial presence in town, with projects perhaps beyond theater.

“I think we’ll help inject a little more energy — at least our particular brand of energy — into the local scene,” he says. “Even the people who hate what we do, it’s OK. That’s partly what it’s about — it’s partly to be provocative.

“I think that’s part of the job description of doing experimental work, is to be a stick in the eye of the status quo.”